Educate & Motivate America

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City:

Philadelphia

State:

Pennsylvania

Organization Overview

ReEntryUSA is a website and database whose mission is to be the most accurate, valuable, user-friendly knowledge center in the US for returning citizens and their stakeholders. ReEntryUSA's primary core product is the building of a nationwide database specifically for ex-offenders. ReEntryUSA is affiliated with the Philadelphia Leadership Foundation.

As a mass incarceration nation, many reports indicate that up to two-thirds of ex-offenders return to prison within three years of their release. According to the United States Department of Justice, over 10,000 ex-prisoners are released into our communities every week. The more we can help them find the support they need to succeed by not returning to prison the safer our communities become.

Project Name

Educate & Motivate America

Project Type:

Marketing and Volunteer Program Development

Project Overview

Educate & Motivate America is a social media marketing initiative to educate America that the website www.ReEntryUSA.com exists. ReEntryUSA is a nationwide database of resources being built specifically for current and formerly incarcerated citizens and their stakeholders. ReEntryUSA’s mission statement is “to be the most accurate, valuable, user-friendly knowledge center in the United States for returning citizens and their stakeholders.”

ReEntryUSA, the database and website, was created in 2016 and is affiliated with the Philadelphia Leadership Foundation. Since then, five volunteers have been committed to its cause, and over 500 resources have been entered into the Resource Database on our website. These resources are currently listed into eight categories, and while this is great, our hope is to grow the website to be much more robust and the go-to resource for this community. Currently, the website attracts 100 visitors per month. Our goal is to attract 10,000 visitors (hits) to the website per month.

In order to add and update resources to be the most accurate, current, and useful, we need volunteers nationwide to help build this database, particularly for local resources. Students interested in this project can receive a separate document that outlines what current volunteer needs would be helpful to us (Jason, the creator and sustainer of the database, is going to post this fluid document on the website in the near future) from Euria Chung. Aside from that, we do not have a strategic volunteer recruitment program developed but would very grateful if a Fels Lab Group could help us do so.

Such an all-encompassing roadmap would direct us at ReEntryUSA how to effectively prioritize our volunteer recruitment efforts to include the management, retention, and sustainability of the program. Achieving this goal would in fact, greatly increase our chances of creating one of the most useful tools ever created to help nudge our nations relatively broken criminal justice system into a much more effective and human restorative justice system. This effort may include the building of a volunteer section on the website as well as a volunteer toolkit for the public.

DELIVERABLES: An ideal deliverable would be a written report that includes a nationwide strategy for volunteer outreach and recruitment, in addition to a social media marketing plan. The report would be presented with a 12-month timeline to implement. ReEntryUSA has no paid staff, and the report would be written in a way that volunteers only would be utilized for its implementation. Of the current five volunteers, the visionary and the information technology persons are strongly committed. The other three volunteers are more advisory and less operationally available.